Consider where the money ends up. Those foreign power plants are frequently very lucrative for large corporations that buy senators. It's a handy way to milk money out of the government and add it to the coffers. Bonus: everyone blames it on the government!

Because building your house so that its more than 500 yards away from a Tornado or an Earthquake is impossible to do, but making sure to build your house more than 500 yards away from the Ocean or the Flood Plain is very easy to do.

I can't really come up with any good reason that I as a taxpayer should be forced to pay to rebuild a house that some millionaire put up on a barrier island on the coast.

Obama called for new efforts to deal with extreme weather like Hurricane Sandy.

Like move coastal populations so we aren't always on the hook for rebuilding people's beach houses?

Are you suggesting that only beach houses were damaged by Hurricane Sandy, or are you suggesting we move NEW YORK FUCKING CITY and every other city that happens to lie in the danger zone, rather than switch to cleaner energy?

Because the first is not true. The second is either insane or ridiculously under-informed.

The plan calls for the end of U.S. support for financing coal power plants in foreign countries

Does "financing" mean "Here, Foreign version of Koch Brothers! FREE MONEY! Just promise to build a fossil fuel plant near Paris!" or does it mean "Here's a loan, underdeveloped country struggling to keep the lights on, to build a cheap power plant. We're going to expect you to play ball when it comes to fighting terrorists. And by that we mean you won't allow cheap versions of HIV drugs into your country."

Well isn't doing something like this, which causes so much angst from the energy sector and Republicans, at least a step in the right direction? Using a US football analogy, we can't always make a touchdown with every effort isn't a heroic 9-yard run a good start? Being any more ambitious with the President's plan would risk all-out resistance from every billion-dollar lobby and politician.

There will be angst from the Republicans no matter what. Heck, if he proposed sticking to the status quo, they'd still angst that he wasn't doing enough to support business. But setting loftier goals might result in a better compromise when the Democrats inevitably cave to Republican demands.

It's a step in the right direction, but his assessment is correct. It doesn't do enough to measurably impact future climate to any appreciable degree.

Or to use a football analogy, it's 3rd down and 20 and we're standing in your own end zone. We're losing 28 to nothing, and it's almost the 4th quarter. Had we applied a strategy at the beginning of the game, we would at least be tied. However, since we let our star players spend most of the game flirting with cheerleaders and had the coaches pounding shots of

And that would be... what? SInce we all know now that global climate change does not specifically mean warming all over.

But if it did mean Africa getting generally warmer, remind me again what life saving air conditioning runs on?

I mean, if you really thought Africa was getting warmer it seems like you would make some allowances to help them, not specifically to yank help away and let more people die than have to. That is, if you wanted to help people at all

He's wearing a respirator, you'll have to listen carefully to hear his offer over the coughing and spluttering.

Chinese cities are beginning to suffer pollution problems hard as a direct result of no pollution controls. It's the same with the 2008 Chinese milk scandal where they were tainted with Melamine in order to fool tests. Inaction is just as bad.

But no money and solar is many years away from being viable for large scale energy use.

Tell that to Germany [wikipedia.org] with 32 gigawatts of solar installed and counting. More generating capacity than the Three Gorges dam. That's large scale, no matter how you slice it.

Not to mention the emissions caused making the panels...

This useless canard again. The emissions from making the panels are trivial, and get lower the more panels there are in use. There's no reason a plant making panels couldn't get its electricity from panels, after all. Even making glass is possible with a solar furnace (though probably not tempered glass). Certainly compared to the emissions produced by extracting coal, panel production emissions are trivial, both in absolute terms (because coal dominates so hugely right now) and in per watt terms, since a kilogram of solar panel generates far more power over its lifetime than a kilogram of coal.

No money is the only reason, and that's purely by choice, not necessity.

Tell that to Germany with 32 gigawatts of solar installed and counting.

You mean the country with enormous economic wealth, that is spending vast sums more money than they should have to after panicking and shutting down nuclear reactors all over?

I am wondering just what nation in Africa you image can afford what Germany can afford.

German solar power is the equivalent of a tiny poodle perfectly manicured in a little pink sweater. Pretty to look at but an entirely impractical luxury that most cannot afford.

If the statement had said "and we're helping Africa fund nuclear stations" that would have been one thing, but we all know that would never be uttered by the same people that claim to want to help the environment.

Tying the Keystone XL to emissions is clever. Sure the tar sands are amongst the filthiest forms of oil , but if emissions are limited, it really doesn't matter since emissions is the point of the sword that kills and everything else is, in the final analysis irrelevant.

If XL is not built, there is nothing stopping the oil from coming in on rail and it's not clear how punishing that would be to the industry.

Emissions are the business end of all policy. Going after emissions is exactly the right thing to do. It creates the environment where innovative technologies that cut emissions are differentially rewarded by the marketplace. Nothing like enlisting greed in your cause.

If big oil and coal want to develop a zero emission technology then they can light this shit on fire until there's none left and it wouldn't matter one bit.

Another great thing about this policy is it will force the retirement of some of the dirtiest fucking coal plants around the country and stop the creation of new dirty ones since investors aren't going to invest in them if they're never going to see the light of day.

This is exactly the right message to send. Make carbon emission expensive and prohibit the worst of it. Spend big on R and D.

Coal plants have already been shutting down due the fact that natural gas is cheaper. Since we've been building natural gas plants, our carbon emissions are down to 1990's levels. Funny thing, we didn't even sign Kyoto, yet we did better than most (all?) countries in reducing carbon.

If the US doesn't want a pipeline that's fine, China has been stroking the Feds dicks up here in Canada for years.

The environmental question is which superpower would make cleaner use of the fuel?

Not to mention if disaster falls somewhere off the West coast as crude is shipped to China/Russia/etc what kind of impact is there going to be to the Pacific Northwest coastline vs a land-based pipeline breach?

Tying the keystone pipeline to emissions does nothing more than give the Canadian government an excuse to sell to China. Your entire comment is based on the flawed assumption that there are no other markets. A pipeline to the US would be far safer than rail or truck and the fuel here would be cleaned to a far higher standard than would ever be seen in China.

Having to pay much more for electricity will mean having less money left over for food, which means less obesity! Now we just need to increase gasoline taxes so they will get more exercise as well. On top of that, high energy consumers, such as, you know, factories, will have to cut down production, perhaps even close down completely, further reducing the pollution! There is just no end to the benefits from artificially inflating the cost of energy.

sad but in this country good food costs more than junk & processed garbage. high fuel costs just means poor people's lives become more miserable while they rest of us just have less free money for toys and entertainment and better gear. poor people have more children too.

Having to pay much more for electricity will mean having less money left over for food

Except electricity prices will not go up if there are financial incentives to modernize houses. Works in the RIAA. (That's NE USA.) They have a carbon tax for 10 years now, and electricity prices are lower on average for everyone, from industry to consumer. And that part of the US economy has grown relative to the rest. Climate action really doesn't have to cost that much if anything in aggregate.

Now, if food prices go up in the future because of major climate induced effects on agriculture, then you rea

Surely food stamps for the few who need them is better for the economy than distorting the entire market for energy.

One external cost of energy is the cost of air pollution, up to $1,600 per person annually [foxnews.com] in health care costs, missed work, and so on. A market cannot work efficiently as long as these costs are shifted away from those who are directly involved in the transaction (the buyer and seller) and towards others (people who breath air) who neither sold nor consumed the energy but had to breathe the

So, we're going to start trying to nix the primary way we generate electricity...and not go nuclear even though we can recycle buried waste into power...and instead we're going to cut down a bunch of trees on public land and toss up solar and wind farms? Yeah, that's logical.

This is purely political and not about the environment or climate change. The climate changes naturally, and adapts to the creatures (us and everything else on earth) and their affects on it. If anything we should be burning less coal from switching to nuclear plants.

saying pipeline can't be completed unless it cuts greenhouse emissions, Obama has shown himself to be a moron of the highest caliber.

Energy use drives progress and has lengthened human life and quality of life. This fake "environmentalism" is just mask on religion of man-haters.

Real environmentalism and the best thing for the human race is to go to clean and powerful energy sources that are superior to the polluting fossil fuels, such as advanced nuclear reactor designs that can't melt down and have no lo

The hypothesis to base limiting carbon dioxide emissions on is that they cause damage to the commons.

Fine, if that's so then limiting them is a bad solution. I understand that it may be worth it for the benefits of the activity. That's fine too. Why is any harm allowed free of cost? Publicly fund research to put a dollar figure on the current marginal damage done by carbon dioxide emissions as well as on the cost to cleanup. Take the minimum of those two values and just tax the emissions at that rate, plus maybe a small percentage markup, right from the start. That way costs are borne by the people causing the harm. They are incentivized to minimize harm even at rates under what would have been the cap. Market forces will determine whether it's worth it and by how much and what amount should be prevented versus cleaned.

The two weaknesses here are monitoring, which is just as much a problem with capping, and determining the cost. The research wont come to a perfect solution, but we can improve it over time. It'll have to be reevaluated periodically anyway since the cost is probably non-linear. In any case I don't see how that's more questionable than coming up with the cap figure. Liberals should be happy with this solution since it more strictly limits than what we have today. Conservative should be happy because everyone pays his fair share and the market gets to work. In reality liberals would hate it because it murders the Earth, and conservatives would hate it because it murders jobs. Both hating it seems just as good as both loving it.

At $0.50-0.60 a watt for today's solar panels, we're almost at the point where people can power their own homes. Unless of course you live where it rains constantly, like the pacific NW, lol. Oh and cloudy days/night time? There are energy storage solutions available - flywheels for example.

There is also the possibility of a more advanced grid that can shift power more easily where it needs to go. Furthermore, wide-spread adoption of electric cars would mean that every car can be a capacitor for the grid, giving a huge amount of robustness to local weather conditions even with a poorly connected grid.

Rather than picking winners and losers and setting arbitrary limits they should be using carbon and fuel taxes.

Under Obama's plan, operations that could pollute less will pollute exactly their limit, places where higher output and thus higher emissions would be actually more efficient in terms of greenhouse gases per MW will instead operate at lower efficiency, the government will spend billions of dollars subsidizing Solyndra wannabes, and actual gas use by consumers will change little no matter how they try to regulate the auto industry.

With carbon and fuel taxes, consumers and corporations would all have better incentives to improve their emissions, the market would decide the best way to allocate resources, energy innovation would be encouraged, there would be tremendously less deadweight loss, and the government could either reduce other taxes or reduce its absurdly large deficits.

People from all across the political spectrum who are informed and honest agree that this, not hard caps or cap-and-trade, is the way to go. But politicians like Obama would rather trash the nation's economy and not actually accomplish any climate progress than touch the third rail of fossil fuel taxes.

In a "town hall" conversation where I brought this up with my Congresscritter- a Tea Party diehard who I'm frequently frustrated with- I was shocked to hear him admit that raising gas taxes and using the revenue to either reduce deficits or reduce taxes on productive behavior is a very good idea. But, he said, it'll never fly, so I'm not going to try to push it. If everybody who knew it's the right thing to do got behind it and tried to educate the populace rather than hiding behind a smokescreen, pretty soon the idea would fly, with bipartisan support.

Since peaking in 2005, US carbon emissions have dropped a gigaton [eia.gov] per year. This was mainly due to switching almost half of coal-powered to electricity to cheaper and cleaner natural gas. This is near the goal [unratified] Kyoto treaty of 5% below 1990 levels. Since this was acheived by market forces rather than government regulation, Obama and environmentalists almost completely ignore this achievement. Obamas new proposal will lower US CO2 output even more.

Since peaking in 2005, US carbon emissions have dropped a gigaton [eia.gov] per year. This was mainly due to switching almost half of coal-powered to electricity to cheaper and cleaner natural gas.

You are only counting CO2. We really don't know how much CH4 has been released due to natural gas drilling in the US. Moreover CH4 is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. We have no effective CH4 release monitoring system.

There has been a recent uptick [europa.eu] in global CH4 levels which is odd because levels had been

This was an opportunity for O to really shine. He speaks of what he will stop, but does not speak of what will replace it. That is as stupid as 'drill, baby, drill' mantra chant of the neo-cons. I had hopes that he would have enough backbone to say that the US needs nukes and then push for thorium as well as IFR.

And as to Keystone, by allowing it to go through, he helps to lower the price of oil which helps the global economy, which makes it possible to build A.E. cheaper.

Don't talk out your has with your mercantilism bullshit. China picked winners too. Their PV production is heavily subsidized. The difference is that they were able to keep pumping money into it until their competitors faltered. Something the US government could not do.

At risk of being modded into oblivion as a troll, this speech today happened exactly because of those "more pressing" matters.

The dude (and many of his acolytes, e.g. Nancy Pelosi) are being slammed with demands that the NSA knock off their rolling 4th Amendment violations program, that the IRS stop targeting political opponents, and a whole host of other scandals that the White House just can't seem to shake.

So, what do you do when you find yourself in trouble? Go talk about hot-button issues that your supporters love and care about - it makes your supporters love you again, and your opponents go talk about something else until that something else dies down or gets forgotten. Poll number drooping among your supporters due to missteps? Talk about gay marriage. IRS caught targeting groups who oppose you? Make abortion pills OTC for teenage girls. You lose an embassy due to incompetence and you get caught spinning the story badly? Seize a tragedy and bring up gun control. Your NSA and Justice Department get caught violating the crap out of everyone's rights and even the New York Times is hating on you for it? Talk about climate change.

To be perfectly fair, if Obama had an "(R)" after his name, he'd bring up anti-abortion initiatives, immigration controls, and similar... The point is that there's a whole lot of political moves that are equivalent to a "Look over there!" maneuver, and it's getting pretty blatant. So before you go shouting "flamebait", stop and think about this for a minute. These initiatives and changes comes pretty hot on the heels of any scandal that threatens to wake up (and more frighteningly, enrage) the public en masse...

The timing *does* seem a bit questionable, but unless publishing schedules have changed markedly he must have been planning to make this speech 6 months ago....though I doubt exactly what he was going to say in it was determined until quite recently.

But the magazine article, in, I believe, the Scientific American, speculated that he was going to use this speech to render the KeystoneXL pipeline more acceptable to his supporters. That seems to have held up.

1) Those technologies and data center locations save the company money through energy costs and government subsidies.
2) They get to spin it as good PR -- Hey Look at us all green and eco-friendly and carbon neutral!

I'm not disagreeing that they're doing potentially good things, but you're deluded if you think the motives are altruistic.

Someone wrote something about that a couple hundred years ago: "But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only... It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages."

Not to mention that reducing our use of oil might be a good way to stop sending piles of our cash to places like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. I'd rather spend $2 on R&D to improve technology than $1 on importing oil: the latter is cheaper in the short-term, but not really in the long-term.

Do you really think the corporations will absorb the costs or pass them on to the consumers!?

It depends on the market. If all products were priced as cost + fixed profit margin, then yes, an increase in cost would be reflected exactly in retail prices. And so would a decrease in cost.

But of course, retail prices aren't a fixed function of cost, and profit margins aren't fixed. In general, the prices companies charge is set by what the market will bear, not directly by their costs. If they could raise prices

What, that the mean average temperature would continue to rise, the ocean level would increase, the ice sheets would recede and the [CO2] would increase?

Sure, some of the wildest "worst case" predictions might not have happened, but the overall thing that science has been pointing to for the past 30 years? It has happened as predicted. You can measure that, and we do.

The effects are also measurable, and again, we note those down.

It's only controversial because the answers are incompatible with big businesses making vast profits from coal, oil and other fossils, so they've paid a great deal of money to make sure people *know* it's controversial, because they say it is. Not because it actually is.

True. But if you agree that emitting CO2 is a bad thing -- a bad thing that may be thought of as a cost -- and that the regulation more or less accurately captures that cost, (I appreciate that these are a lot of assumptions, but they're necessary to isolate the issue that we're talking about) then all the regulation does is to capture a previously external cost as an internal economic one. The plants that go out of business in this environment will be the ones that the regulations reveal to have been a net consumer, not a producer, of value all along. I wouldn't lose much sleep about that.

It used to be legal to dump industrial waste into streams. It no longer is. That likely put some folks out of business.

It also used to be legal to move dirt from one part of your yard to another to keep a low spot from having standing water for several days after a rain. It is no longer. And it has made some people's land entirely worthless. And it's the same law - they just call dirt "pollution" and standing storm water "navigable waters". And that is how good intentions are used to allow tyrants to rule.

And when the IRS wants 10% more each year just because, and without respect to your income, they will soon run you into bankruptcy, not because you screwed up your taxes.

Same thing here. Emissions of X is legal now, but will soon be illegal. If they manage to reduce it to meet the new standards, they will ratchet it down again until it is not economically feasible to operate.

Ah, a radio show transcript. Isn't it funny how the wisest people on earth all have radio shows rather than jobs where they have to do so much as put on clothing for the camera?

You've never listened to Radio 4 [bbc.co.uk], have you? (Sorry if that doesn't work wherever you happen to be.) I recommend The Life Scientific, which is quite a pleasant talk show where scientists (duh) come on and talk about their particular fields. Plus, it's hosted by an actual scientist [jimal-khalili.com] and, in a breaking move for the Beeb, one that hasn't been in a boy band.

If science isn't your bag then give "In Our Time" a try. The topics are much more varied but you do get Melvyn Bragg (chancellor of a University and a fellow

Why is it out of line to expect actual expertise from someone giving an expert opinion? I wouldn't trust a climatologist to fix my car; I wouldn't trust my mechanic to treat me if I were ill; and I don't expect a professional demagogue--like this radio host of yours--to be an expert at anything but demagoguery.

Then why in the fuck are we entrusting a bunch of corrupt politicians to draft and vote on healthcare reform whom know absolutely nothing about the industry, nor why it's jacked up to begin with?! They didn't even read it which makes it all that more insulting!!!

Hint: the government caused the problems to begin with.

BTW, your heroes in office aren't forced to eat this dog food like the rest of us. Two standards: one for them, the other for the rest of us.

Yes. I'm suggesting that with so many voices to listen to out there and little time, I've completely given up on radio show hosts in general. There are exceptions, but skimming through the transcript I found that line, which suggested that this guy was not one of those exceptions.

I am not a climate scientist. So someone please help me to understand how and why the ice caps melting is a perfectly okay thing? I'm not asking whether or not the ice caps melting is man made. It's another discussion and certainly one which is harder to prove or observe. But we've got ice melting that has been frozen for many, many planetary cycles giving scientists access to a wealth of new data on earth's history.

By the time it all goes to hell, I'll be long gone, dead and in the ground. And if anyone *is* still around that wants to curse my name or my generation, I'll be DEAD..and not terribly bothered about it.

I'm only here on earth a short time...and gonna enjoy my life to the fullest while I'm here, I see no reason to start sacrificing my time and effort for anything that won't really affect me nor anyone I know immediately alive now

I am not a climate scientist. So someone please help me to understand how and why the ice caps melting is a perfectly okay thing? I'm not asking whether or not the ice caps melting is man made.

Yes, implicit in your question is the assumption it is human caused. If you thought it wasn't caused by us, then your question is moot. Good or bad, it's going to happen. The question is not "is this good?", but "how do we deal with it?" For example, the people in Pompeii probably didn't stop to ask "is this good or bad", they had a grasp on the situation and lept right to the question "how do I get out of here?" Those who sat pondering "is this good or bad" are the ones we find in the archeological digs.

How is it not climate change?I have an extremely open mind. Just lay out some reasons why it's not climate change.... I *want* to believe climate change is a hoax. It just doesn't look like one to me.

The obvious lie in "Climate Change" is that the definition changes during any discussion. If by "Climate Change" you mean the same changing of the climate that has been going on since the Earth was formed, no one would argue with you. No one believes that we have ever been in some magical static time for the climate. That definition is only used to "prove" that "Climate Change" is real. It is also a definition of "Climate Change" that does not require or even suggest any change in human behavior.

Just for the record, the Arctic icecap melting isn't such a big deal if you are wondering about sea level rise (Arctic ice floats, melting it won't increase the sea level). However, Arctic tundra unfreezing means more carbon in the atmosphere, it's a feedback loop. Also, the Arctic unfreezing could change ocean currents. It might change the climate in Europe and other places.

If Greenland melts, that's a different story since that ice is on land. Melting all of it will raise the sea level between 11 and 22 f

So a radio talk show host, along with a single scientist well known in the community for his outspoken opinions on climate change, on one side of the argument, and then a vast, vast body of peer-reviewed work and many hundreds of disparate and inter-arguing (ie, non-colluding) scientists on the other. Oh, and facts.

Pssst... I think he's got his ranking scale inverted. That would put somebody like Ed Witten as the smartest and D.P. at the other end of the scale. He might be off by one too. Did he start counting at 0 or at 1?

I too find this questionable. "Well see if it negatively impacts the environment before we approve it," is not at all reassuring given that he's already been told numerous times that it will.

But I suppose saying something is a little bit better than the usual ignoring the issue. And the NRDC certainly seems happy. I'm going to allow myself to hope it's just a more politic way to shut it down, but I'm not going to be surprised if it isn't.

> And Congress does have the authority to say, "That's all very nice, we'll give your department a $5 budget to make it all work".

But then they wouldn't get paid because allies/friends of the President are in office with overriding concerns, who would block that. In practice, the authority is hollow. It's one big elite party up there. Congress has no power that isn't levied to them, in the form of public announcement+donations+perks. The intent of the law is the least of a politician's worries.

Most people, I find, aren't really aware of the ramifications of Administrative Law and the evolution of the Executive Branch. Over the past couple of centuries, Congress had passed laws and created agencies under the purview of the President to administrate. Over time, this has resulted in a massive federal system of administrative agencies who have the power to issue regulations based on their interpretation of the law. This has been found Constitutional, since it's nothing but the natural outgrowth of "Congress makes laws, the President executes them," but sometimes it produces shocking results to the lay person.
Kind of like the patent system and "limited time," perhaps the administrative apparatus has gone far beyond its original intent, but by the letter of the law, that's perfectly fine. It's a matter for the voters and Congress to fix it, not the courts.

Too many middle-income families already struggle paying for gas, raising those taxes wouldn't solve anything. Cycling infrastructure should be setup by local governments, not federal. High-speed rail should be setup by the private sector, not public. 0 for 3

I hope this is sarcasm, because the Montreal Protocol is widely hailed as one of the greatest successes in international cooperation and pollution control. As a result of the treaty, ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere (as measured in equivalent chlorine) have declined by 10%, and the ozone hole over Antarctica is poised to have resorted by 1 million square km (of a peak of 25 million square km) by 2015.

Really, the only failure of the Montreal Protocol was the promotion of HCFC-22 which does less ozone damage but is a major greenhouse gas. (It's being phased out for more ozone-safe refrigerants, but it'll be up there for centuries.)

Does anyone remember the introduction of catalytic converters for cars? What was it we were told? We were told the converters would convert the noxious emissions into harmless water...and carbon dioxide.

Well, when the alternative is carbon monoxide, unburned gasoline, and NOx, I think we'll take the CO2 and water. But just because it's non-toxic doesn't mean that it's not a pollutant.